White House Denies Hersh's Allegation on Nord Stream Pipeline Explosions

By IndraStra Global News Team

Cover Image Attribute: Gas leak at Nord Stream 2 as seen from the Danish F-16 interceptor on Bornholm, Denmark; September 27, 2022. / Source: Reuters

According to a 5000-word report by Seymour Hersh (published on the online publishing platform Substack), a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, a string of powerful explosions occurred in September 2022, causing the destructions of Nord Stream 1 and 2 underwater gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea were a covert operation ordered by the White House and carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in co-operation with Norway. 

Hersh claimed that US deep-sea divers planted mines along pipelines using a NATO military exercise as a cover, which were later remotely detonated.

He writes in the report that the operation was carried out "under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as Baltic Operations 22 or BALTOPS 22", which took place in June 2022 off the coast of Germany. He said that deep-sea divers from the US Navy's Diving and Salvage Centre in Panama City, Florida, the largest diving facility in the world, planted C4 explosives alongside the pipeline, which were later triggered by a sonar buoy dropped by a plane.

These pipelines run from Russia to Germany via the Baltic Sea and supply a direct and reliable source of natural gas to the continent of Europe. It was quickly determined that the attack was deliberate; however, the person responsible for it had not been found.

Map Attribute: Map of the explosions caused at the Nord Stream pipelines on September 26, 2022 / Wikipedia

Later, Hersh claimed that on September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made "a seemingly routine flight" and released the sonar buoy. "The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1," he wrote. "A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered, and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission. Within a few minutes, pools of methane gas that remained in the shuttered pipelines could be seen spreading on the water's surface, and the world learned that something irreversible had taken place."

On Wednesday, the White House rejected Hersh's blog post and called it "utterly false and complete fiction." 

In the past, Sweden and Denmark, whose exclusive economic zones were the locations of the explosions, concluded that the pipelines were blown up on purpose. Still, neither country has speculated as to who might be to blame. The US and NATO have referred to the incident as "an act of sabotage." Moscow has pointed the finger of blame at the West for the explosions that cannot be explained and caused the ruptures. Either side has presented no evidence.

About Nord Stream Pipelines

The Nord Stream gas pipelines were first proposed in 2005 when the Russian state-owned gas company Gazprom and a consortium of European companies announced their intention to build the pipelines. The first phase of the Nord Stream project was completed in 2011 and has a capacity of 55 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually. The project's second phase, Nord Stream 2, has been completed, but Germany has denied giving an operational clearance due ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. If deployed, it would expand the capacity of the existing pipelines by another 55 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year.

The Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines are a complex and controversial project operated by a Swiss-based company whose major shareholder is Russian energy major; Gazprom. Despite having potential benefits, there are also substantial risks associated with the project. These risks include political, environmental, and economic risks- all of which have been unfolding from 2022 onwards. 

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